1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, apparatus and computer program product for controlling installation of software. And more particularly to a method and computer program suitable for installing drivers for peripheral devices.
2. Discussion of the Background
Recently, the number of people using digital equipment instead of an analog device is increasing. For instance, many people now use a digital still camera instead of a film camera. Such digital equipment is often connected to personal computer for a several purposes. In a case of a digital still camera, a digital still camera may be connected to personal computer by a USB (Universal Serial Bus) cable for playing a taken picture on computer screen, storing into a recoding media, such as a hard disk, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, or the like, or printing. Before executing these operations on or with the computer, software such as image viewer and/or a device driver must be installed in the personal computer. However, some people are not familiar with personal computers. Therefore, they often do not know how to install drivers or other related software into personal computer and/or cannot understand how to install this software even if they read a manual of the equipment. Additionally, if a user tries to install software and fails, it is very hard for the user to fix the problem. To support such users, manufacturer may run a support center with an operator in the support center answering user's question or teaching a user by telephone on how to install the driver or related software. However, this is often a frustrating experience for the user. Also, the more people that use a vendor's digital equipment, the more users need support, and therefore the cost of running a support center increases.
Additionally, Japanese patent laid open no.: 2001-109617, corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 6,822,753, discloses a computer readable media, anyone can setup easily for using printer without failure. However, these references preempt the installation wizard that may exist in the computer to which the printer/peripheral is being installed. By preempting the computer's native installation wizard, hardware authentication errors and other installation errors may occur.
Thus, as discovered by the present inventors, what is desirable is an ability to have a method, apparatus, and computer program product for presenting additional information while a computer's native installation wizard is stepping a user through an installation or troubleshooting procedure. Also, it is desirable to have an ability to check a registry of drivers and delete unknown, unwanted, out-of-date, or corrupted device drivers.